A. David Buckingham has been at the University of Cambridge since 1969. He is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2007, he was the inaugural recipient of the Ahmed Zewail Prize in Molecular Sciences. In 2001, OSA presented him with the Charles Hard Townes Medal “for many theoretical and experimental contributions to electro-optics and magneto-optics, including the invention and application of a direct method for measuring molecular electric quadruple moments.” He is a Fellow of OSA and of the Royal Society.